Star Wars introduced the world to Jedi knights with lightsabers, an evil empire building a moon size planet killer weapon, a rebel alliance with X-wing fighters and countless cool droids that were often smarter than their owners.

When I took spacecraft design courses at university in the late 1980s (as part of my undergraduate degree), I did not dream that fellow Star Wars fans might one day be influential enough to actually design real spacecraft.

We were taught that bringing a rocket back to Earth from space was impossible. I now realise that my lecturers were probably not Star Wars fans.

At this point, the Star Wars mega-fan (Musk) is ahead of the Trekkie (Bezos) in delivering commercial space flight with reused rockets. But only time will tell who will win.

Speeders

Star Wars introduced us to the Landspeeder. This is the car-like vehicle that Luke Skywalker uses to get to and from the family moisture farm, and which he sells so he can part-pay Han Solo to fly with him to the Alderaan system.

Luke’s X-34 landspeeder is very much like a hovercraft that did exist long before Star Wars. But hovercraft are noisy and kick up a lot of dust, which is not great in the desert driving situations encountered on Tatooine!

In 1978, a toy landspeeder was the must have toy, and I was lucky enough to have one. I still have it of course. The way it appeared to float across the floor on its highly sprung and hidden wheels was brilliant design.

Subsequent Star Wars films such as Return of the Jedi showed us speeder bikes, and since then engineers have tried to replicate these amazing vehicles.

Some great engineering efforts include the Jetovator speeder bike that works over water and connects to a jet ski. The makers were clearly inspired by Star Wars.

Others have recently created and tested hoverbikes that if they were fully commercialised would be very close to the speederbikes of Star Wars.

One group has even made a speeder, the Aero-X, to test in the desert to ensure that Luke would be able to use it if need be.

Droids

But for me, it was the droids of Star Wars that had the greatest impact. There can be no greater pair of onscreen robots as R2-D2 and C-3PO. They were perfect.

I have written before about Star Wars and robots. The vision that George Lucas and his team had in creating these robots (and the others that are found in the original 1977 movie) has had a major impact on robotics development, by inspiring many current day roboticists.